Author and blogger, Rebecca Blood, is puzzling over some words that David Weinberger uttered.
Blogging is more like a conversation, and “you can’t develop a code of ethics for conversations,” said David Weinberger, a prominent blogger and research fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “A conversation with your best friend would become stilted and alienating.”
I think David doesn’t want to see conversations stifled on any level, so he’s afraid of regulations of any sort. Yet, Rebecca is right to point out that human communications always rely on ethics, to one degree or another. She writes:
First of all, publishing a weblog is not at all like a conversation between two people, it’s more like speaking in front of a room full of people–some of them trusted, some of them strangers–and having every word you say recorded and catalogued for future random retrieval. So that analogy doesn’t work.